Some of the world's most pressing and fascinating problems - from decoding the human body to exploring the universe to the design of super-fast Formula One racing cars in 3-D format - are being addressed using the technology innovation of Sun Microsystems.
The IT visionary's UltraSPARC III processor-based systems are at the heart of innovative research globally, having sold into the tens of thousands worldwide in less than a year. "With this chip, Sun created systems to keep pace with the human imagination," says Stefano Mattiello, managing director at Sun Microsystems SA. "The processor's proven reliability and scalability are behind some of the most fascinating technology-driven projects around the world, including exploration of the universe, decoding of the human body and 3-D modelling for better race cars."
In the UK, the University of Durham's new supercomputer facility, the "Cosmology Machine," is undertaking the most complex and far-reaching cosmology project to date with the help of Sun's Midframe servers. The facility consists of 64 Sun Blade 1000 workstations and a 24-way Sun Fire 6800 server managed by Sun's Grid Engine software that is helping to re-create the evolution of the universe through ultra-high-speed calculations of data from billions of observations of stars, gases and galaxies.
Also focused on life-altering discoveries, pharmaceutical giant Caprion Pharmaceuticals is helping save human lives through the rapid acceleration of new drug development using Sun Midframe servers, Sun Blade 1000 workstations and Sun 280R Enterprise servers.
Since Sun's product line is based on SPARC and Solaris technologies, the entire environment integrates seamlessly, decreasing complexity, contributing to faster time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Comprising Sun Fire 3800, 4800 and 6800 servers, Caprion's data centre represents one of the largest and fastest dedicated protein analysis server banks in the world, capable of analysing more than one million proteins in the human body and increasing research speed by 20 times.
One the 3-D modelling front, West McLaren Mercedes, one of the most successful teams in the history of Formula One racing, designs, simulates and revises 3D models of its race cars using Sun Blade 1000 workstations in concert with a Sun Technical Compute Farm. Ninety-five percent of a typical car's 10 800 components are completely redesigned in any given season utilising the large memory footprint and 64 bit-computing ability of the Sun Blade1000.
Through the increased compute utilisation and superior graphics provided by its Sun solution, McLaren can review more iterations of its designs and make critical adjustments to its Formula One race cars.
France Telecom, which hosts mission critical Web sites of some of the most popular and prestigious sporting events in Europe, relies on the power and stability of the Sun Fire 280R servers to manage the frequent change in bandwidth load demand. As more fans are now monitoring their favourite events in real-time, promoters must provide an architecture to handle the increased online traffic. The scalability and reliability of the UltraSPARC III processor is critical when demand can reach in excess of 603 million hits for a single event.
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